A footnote turns out to hold a century. Finishing his line-by-line reading of Jean Baudrillard, Bob hands the hour to Cameron, who has been rereading Harold Innis’ 1946 Political Economy in the Modern State — and finds, in the last note of an essay on nineteenth-century English literature, Edward Bulwer-Lytton writing in 1833 that “the magic of Gutenberg conjured a wide chasm between the past and future history of mankind” . The Gutenberg Galaxy, stated a century and a quarter early. From there the two chase the buried eye/ear tradition McLuhan came out of, the occult-conspiracy stream that runs from Bulwer’s Vril to the present, and Bob’s own arc of tactility “squared” into the Android Meme and beyond .
Key Topics
- Cameron reads Innis as the model for McLuhan’s own method — essays “about 90% quotations from other people,” where you can’t tell “when it’s Innis talking or when he’s quoting somebody.”
- Through Innis, the hosts recover Walter Bagehot on London as a newspaper, “everything is there and everything is disconnected,” and Bulwer’s line that the English now “find their stage in politics” — the Global Theater in 1833.
- Bob reads Vincent Sherry on the French “ideologues” — Condorcet, Sieyès, Destutt de Tracy — who founded “ideology” as a study of images and sense-impressions, later turned reactionary by Saint-Simon and Comte.
- Bob identifies Bulwer-Lytton from conspiracy literature: author of The Coming Race and its mind-controlling energy “Vril,” a headwater running through Theosophy, Blavatsky, Crowley, and Leary.
- Cameron reads Innis’ master theme as the loss of “balance” that carried England from a century of peace to a century of war , dating McLuhan’s “second conversion” to the 1946 Innis book handed him by Easterbrook.
- Bob’s tactility takes off “squared” into the Android Meme; Cameron corrects that this is really the loss of tactility, “what first makes taking over possible,” mistaken for something that can be taken over.
Notable Quotes
"The magic of Gutenberg has conjured a wide chasm between the past and future history of mankind. The people on one side of the gulf are not the people on the other."
"Tactility is not something that can be taken over. It's what first makes taking over possible."
"That's why he says language is tactility. It carries all the senses. It's not oral, it's tactile."
Outline
- 0:00:01 — Finishing Baudrillard: visual space and the post-spectacular
- 0:08:44 — Rereading Innis: London as a newspaper
- 0:15:14 — Bagehot: everything there and disconnected
- 0:17:45 — The eye-ear ideologues and Vincent Sherry
- 0:23:50 — The French ideologues: Condorcet to Comte
- 0:38:25 — The magic of Gutenberg: Bulwer’s footnote
- 0:38:51 — Vril, the occult, and the conspiracy genealogy
- 0:45:54 — Back to Plato and Aristotle
- 0:50:16 — Tactility squared: the Android Meme and AI
- 0:57:20 — The Innis–McLuhan–Easterbrook circle
- 01:13:32 — McLuhan’s second conversion
- 01:37:02 — “The popular Simon has received a soul”
- 01:44:16 — Two satanic monsters: the intoxicated mass and the transhuman
- 01:52:42 — Multimedia, tactility, and language
- 02:05:33 — The founders and the missed interviews
- 02:16:32 — Closing: the telegraph revolution and the stage in politics
Mentioned Resources
Works by Harold Innis
- Political Economy in the Modern State (1946) — the essay collection Cameron rereads, including “An Economic Approach to English Literature in the Nineteenth Century,” whose last footnote quotes Bulwer
Works by Marshall McLuhan
- The Gutenberg Galaxy — invoked as the heir to Innis’ quotation-built method
- The Mechanical Bride — the 1951 book whose late Innis footnote anchors the disputed first-meeting story
- Take Today — the book Easterbrook and Cameron each came to appreciate only on rereading
Other Works
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race (1871) — the “Vril” novel Bob traces into Theosophy and neo-Nazi mysticism
- Vincent Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (1993) — Bob’s source for the nineteenth-century eye-ear tradition
- Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics (1872) — on how civilizations sustain and then liberalize themselves
- Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy — cited on empathy and “theater lips”
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein — Cameron’s figure for the transposable mind leading on to AI
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus — the ladder one climbs and then throws away
- The Morning of the Magicians — waypoint in the modern conspiracy stream
People
- Bob Dobbs (co-host; author of the Trump book under discussion)
- Cameron McEwen (co-host; McLuhan scholar rereading Innis)
- Harold Innis (Canadian economic historian whose media work anchored McLuhan)
- Marshall McLuhan (media theorist at the center of the dialogue)
- W.T. Easterbrook (McLuhan’s Manitoba friend and the conduit to Innis)
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton (Victorian novelist, politician, and occultist)
- Walter Bagehot (Victorian journalist and constitutional writer)
- Vincent Sherry (literary scholar of Pound, Lewis, and radical modernism)
- Ezra Pound (modernist poet; one of Sherry’s “men of 1914”)
- Wyndham Lewis (modernist writer and painter; the other of the pair)
- Plato and Aristotle (the alphabet-era split the eye/ear work returns to)
- Auguste Comte and Henri de Saint-Simon (who turned “ideology” reactionary)
- Madame Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley, Tim Leary (the occult lineage from Vril)
- Donald Trump (the book’s subject; the “shaman” who “hijacked the process”)
- Carl Williams (with McLuhan and Easterbrook, a founder of Explorations)
Closing
The dialogue is the series’ deepest dig into McLuhan’s nineteenth-century roots — the moment a conspiracy-lit footnote and a forgotten political economist converge to show that “media studies already was happening” long before anyone named it.
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